A Faulknerian sentence.
In the week that the Trump administration embraced a tax bill that cuts the rate for the wealthiest among us from 39.6 percent to 37 percent and permanently cuts the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent — while sunsetting individual tax cuts — and eliminates the alternative minimum tax for corporations and doubles the estate tax exemption — again, for the very wealthiest among us — and obliterates Obamacare's mandate — which will jack up insurance premiums and leave 13 million Americans uninsured — the administration also issued mandatory Orwellian Newspeak for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which forbids seven doubleplusungood words (one instantly recalls George Carlin's hilarious, 1972 "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television") "in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget" — those being "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based" and "science-based," which leaves one mystified as to how science and budget analysts can address matters of say, a fetus, without calling it a fetus — and which caused said analysts to ask, "Are you serious? Are you kidding?" just as the administration, in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency, had hired on a no-bid contract basis a Republican opposition-research firm to investigate agency employees who had been critical of or questioned EPA's management under Scott Pruitt — whose investigations are being led by a thug with the deliciously apt name of "Blutstein" — while the administration also hosted the NRA's Wayne LaPierre — who is perhaps as despicable as his presidential host — on the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, which took the lives of 20 beautiful children and six courageous adults, all without so much as a tweet from Trump expressing condolences to the families of the tragically slain.
As a novelist, William Faulkner plunged into literary modernism — hence his run-on sentences — and was identified as a member of the Southern Renaissance. But he never imagined such a dreadful modernity as Trump's, and the president's base of Southern bigots and ignoramuses are anything but a collective devoted to making America great again — a Renaissance flowering.
For this was, in addition, a week in which Trump declared total war on America's law-enforcement institutions; we are rapidly resembling Pakistan or Honduras more than any civilized nation of laws — the very cornerstone of what the founders constitutionally erected. Trump's ruling political party — the goons who long ago appropriated God and flag — is content to grab its plutocratic boodle in exchange for unholy legislative favors, such as the godawful tax bill, while wholly dismissing its constitutional obligations of power-checking. There is no one in charge but the top goon.
All this makes the mind run on in flurries of dystopian despair. A chief tool of any novelist is irony. And how ironic is it that America is hitting rock bottom under the guise of making it great again.